Wilderness Narrowboats: the story of our formation and a bit more about Wilderness developments - written by Bob Howell

Sometime in the middle of 2007 I had my first conversation with Ian Graham about the feasibility of bringing the Beaver 23 back into production. That was about 7 years after the fire at the factory damaged and/or completely destroyed the old moulds. We decided that we could build a new hull mould from the last hull made before the fire. that the original deck mould was undamaged and usable but that we would have to have a new cabin mould built. Further conversations with Pat Cuss, the MD of Fibreglass Applications who builds the shells, resulted in a decision to make the new deck/cabin mould in one piece and then bond the hull, deck/cabin and roof into a one-piece “monocoque” shell instead of screwing them together as in the earlier boats.

There have been several other, relatively minor, changes in the shell building process - mainly to bond in assorted lengths of timber in order to make the fitting out process easier. One major change has been to bond the plywood floor directly to the hull rather than mounting it on cross members, thus adding around 40-50mm to the internal headroom.

Having the moulds rebuilt and getting the first shell ready for fitting out took much longer and cost far more than we had budgeted (what a surprise!) but, on the whole, we were reasonably pleased with progress. Things then took a considerable turn for the worse when in October 2007 we entrusted the first shell to a firm based in Brimscombe, near Stroud to be fitted out. Despite many promises and assurances, they failed to have our demonstration boat ready for shows at Earls Court in December 2007 or the NEC in February 2008 and the quality of much of the work was poor. We removed the boat from their yard in February and we were not surprised to hear that the firm went into receivership soon afterwards.

It took us until April 2008 to find another fitter (Oxfordshire Narrowboats) with whom we felt comfortable. The first thing they had to do was to undertake a certain amount of remedial work on our “demonstration boat” before going on to fit out the first two boats made for customers. We have now entrusted them with our fitting-out work.

As everybody knows, the recession has been pretty dire for all boat builders and we were no exception. I understand from one of my contacts in the industry that between January and August 2008, British Waterways registered 870 newly built boats: in the same period in 2009 they registered 130! According to an article in the Times written immediately after the January 2010 London Boat show, some 50 or so boat builders went bust in 2009…

But all is not doom and gloom, so now for the good news! We have reviewed our pricing model so that, instead of offering just a fully-fitted “Super De Luxe” model with lots of features (luxuries?) built-in and at a price to match, we now offer a “Trailaway” boat with a very basic specification (not unlike a steel boat “Sailaway”) and with a whole series of optional “packs” (e.g., Gas Pack, Water Pack, Heating Pack, etc) and individual extras to the customer’s choice. The “Trailaway” boat is priced at £19,995 (including VAT), and we also supply bare shells or semi-fitted boats for the dedicated DIY enthusiast. Happily our order book is beginning to look pretty good again...

Bob Howell